Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.

Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

BitCoin does not offer all the things that some people want. It's not anonymous. It's traceable by design. It's online. It requires authentications, which takes a while.

There's lots of different properties one can want in a currency that BitCoin doesn't provide, and it's probably impossible to make a currency that matches EVERY wish EVERY person on earth has. States try that with fiat currencies and fail.

Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.

Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

Solidcoin is just a profit-driven scam IMO.

Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.

Devcoin has a mechanism which pays 10% of mining profits to developers - an interesting experiment at what's basically a voluntary, decentralized taxation mechanism.

Namecoin is actually really useful (or would be if anyone actually used it) - it's a decentralized DNS system (DNS systems map IP addresses like 173.194.73.105 to human-readable URLs like google.com)

Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.

Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

Solidcoin is just a profit-driven scam IMO.

Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.

Devcoin has a mechanism which pays 10% of mining profits to developers - an interesting experiment at what's basically a voluntary, decentralized taxation mechanism.

Namecoin is actually really useful (or would be if anyone actually used it) - it's a decentralized DNS system (DNS systems map IP addresses like 173.194.73.105 to human-readable URLs like google.com)

So they do have some redeeming value.

I'm curious what can I actually do with Litecoins?Now I'm only selling it on vircurex ...

Since the emergence of Bitcoin, several alternative cryptocurrencies have appearted, although afaik none have them come even close to bitcoin in terms of popularity, trading volume and money involved.

Question: why? Is there something wrong with Bitcoin? What advantages do the alternatives offer? What does Bitcoin lack what the others don't?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

It's my impression that these alternatives were only introduced by people who would like to be early adopters themselves, hoping to see their stack of virtual coins (which are cheap or free to obtain in the early stages) booming just like BTC. Or am I mistaken?

Litecoin is interesting because its mining mechanism is designed to be CPU-friendly, so you have less of an advantage from mining it with specialized hardware.

That advantage has been proven to be false, after the GPU miner was released, it was found that GPU's were much faster at mining LTC.

If you ask me, that was the biggest advantage for Litecoin. The secondary advantages are that confirmations occur 4 times faster (one every 2.5 minutes or 150s) and that the limit of maximum coins is also 4 times higher.

This will be important once bitcoin hits mainstream, but that's atleast 5 years away, plenty of more useful currencies could come out by then.

Either way, it's crashing right now, so I'm buying in on the way down. In it for the long haul

BitCoin does not offer all the things that some people want. It's not anonymous. It's traceable by design. It's online. It requires authentications, which takes a while.

There's lots of different properties one can want in a currency that BitCoin doesn't provide, and it's probably impossible to make a currency that matches EVERY wish EVERY person on earth has. States try that with fiat currencies and fail.

Of course, but Bitcoin clones won't satisfy those needs, which I think is what the OP is referring to. Some of the properties you've mentioned require radically different designs and others can be built on top of Bitcoin and don't make much sense as independent alternatives.

Litecoin is billed as the silver to bitcoins gold. It's healthy to have more than one virtual currency.

It's healthy, but having clones with minor differences is also redundant. I don't want to undervalue the Litecoin development efforts, I agree that it's valuable even if solely as an experiment, but I don't think it's very helpful as a competitor. If it was more scalable than Bitcoin, which silver is, compared to gold, then that bill would make sense. However as it stands, Litecoin is almost the same deal.

BitCoin does not offer all the things that some people want. It's not anonymous. It's traceable by design. It's online. It requires authentications, which takes a while.

There's lots of different properties one can want in a currency that BitCoin doesn't provide, and it's probably impossible to make a currency that matches EVERY wish EVERY person on earth has. States try that with fiat currencies and fail.

Yes but the alternative cryptocurrencies are like clones of bitcoin with another name. So they share all the problems of bitcoin and fix nothing